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host families, in the community and on TV, as well as having opportunities topractice in a wide range of situations, their knowledge of vocabulary and idiomaticexpressions had also increased. As Han Ding commented:I feel that now you are in the country yourself, you hear both standard and nonstandardpronunciations … When I did not have lessons, I liked to watch footballand seek opportunities to talk with people. The elderly British like to talk withothers … I like this vivid, real, ‘pure English’, ‘authentic English’.Dai Han made a similar point:I feel sure there was improvement because, at the start, I had to think inadvance about what to say next, what comes first and what follows. But later on,no matter what, we speak as we like, not having to think too much. Even if it’sjust a word, once it’s said, people could understand.Wan Dawei summarised the benefits of a three-month stay thus:What I feel most strongly is my linguistics skills have improved. To be honest,before that I wasn’t sure about many things. The three-month study has givenme confidence in my own language … Before that I wasn’t certain about some ofwhat I said and did not feel confident about what I told my students … But now Iam very confident and can explain what they are. The good thing is, when I feelmore confident, I am better able to influence my students.Lesson planning and deliveryThere is a disjunction in the initial training of teachers in China between, on theone hand, English language proficiency and knowledge about the language and,on the other, the pedagogical skills required to teach English. As Hu (2005: 674)points out:The language skill courses are not generally concerned with how targetlanguage skills (i.e., listening, speaking, reading, and writing) and communicationstrategies can be developed in the secondary classroom; the languageknowledge courses tend not to give any attention to how secondary studentscan best be helped to master specific language systems (e.g., pronunciation,grammar, and vocabulary).For this reason, the focus of the programme is not simply improving participants’proficiency but also on extending their repertoire of teaching methods and therewere strong indications that this approach has been successful.We have already commented on more general changes related to the Confucianphilosophy underpinning their teaching. There was also evidence of changerelated more specifically to the teaching of English. All the participants highlightedthe practical teaching techniques, skills, and strategies that they had learned onthe course. Examples of how they had been able to put this learning into practiceincluded the use of active learning strategies, such as correction codes in studentwriting as a way of not only improving students’ active learning, participationand autonomy, but also reducing teacher workload; mind maps in the learning of116 | English Teachers China